Más allá del procedimiento: la catábasis como principio estructural en Locus Solus de Raymond Roussel

En este artículo analizamos, desde el punto de vista de su estructura, la novela Locus Solus (1914) de Raymond Roussel, con la que el novelista quiso ilustrar su famoso “procedimiento”. Ofrecemos, concretamente, una lectura alternativa de la obra, que puede interpretarse como una recreación del episodio clásico de la catábasis, al que se equipara fenomenológicamente. La sección principal de esta innovadora novela incluye ocho tableaux-vivants en los que los muertos, artificialmente vueltos a la vida por el personaje principal (Martial Canterel), representan repetidamente los instantes cruciales de sus vidas. La complejidad de la geografía del “Infierno”, la presencia de un guía y el hecho de que los muertos de los tableaux vivants experimentan sentimientos y actitudes reminiscentes de los experimentados en vida evocan motivos presentes ya en la nékyia de Ulises (Odisea XI), la catábasis de Eneas (Eneida VI) y la Divina Comedia de Dante.

On the reception and agency of neoclassical sculpture and its material: case studies from Viennese sculpture galleries (c. 1780-1820)

The last two decades have seen a surge in publications and exhibitions on neoclassical sculpture, exploring histories of collecting, transnational artistic exchange, artistic self-fashioning strategies, workshop processes, new biographical insights and art-theoretical questions. However, there is relatively little research regarding the display and staging of neoclassical sculpture in comparison with earlier periods. The years around 1800 marked the peak of a fashion for purpose-built galleries that appeared all over Europe. The multimedia setting for sculpture in this new type of building tied in with contemporary patterns of staging and viewing artworks in different contexts, such as tableaux vivants and phantasmagorias. This article investigates the different modes of communication between viewer and object in neoclassical sculpture galleries to shed light on the reception of these objects and their respective material. Case studies are centred on the Viennese sculpture galleries of Nicolas II, Prince Esterházy, Andrej Razumovsky and Joseph Count of Fries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Decoding Tableaux Vivants: the Metareferential Potential of Painterly References in Cinema

The article focuses on the intermedial relationship between cinema and painting, viewed as a self-referential process, and tries to determine various ways in which this type of signifying process can be used to “encode” various messages (within the work itself), or become an integral part of this (meta)communicative operation. Starting from a broad definition of intermedial references and continuing with a brief recontextualized detour through Gérard Genette’s taxonomy of transtextual instances, the author narrows down a specific technique that exemplifies this type of “codifying” procedure, namely the tableau vivant. In accordance with Werner Wolf’s proposed terminology, he attempts to determine the metareferential potential of this extra-compositional self-referential technique. The case studies focus on films by Peter Greenaway and Lars von Trier.

Images in Suspension: Tableaux Vivants, Gesturality and Simulacra in Raul Ruiz’s film The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting

The article discusses Raul Ruiz’s film The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978). In the closed space of the house a parallel world emerges, where the filmic hypertext is constituted by a series of mise-en-abyme images that explore the multiple universe of tableaux vivants. The article analyses Ruiz’s appropriation of Pierre Klossowski’s concept of simulacra. The structure of The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is based upon the infinite reproduction of meaning since each simulacrum-tableau vivant leads to another. The author explores the gesturality of the bodies and its relevance to the use of language and sound in the film. Furthermore, he argues that Ruiz orchestrates the placement of the tableaux vivants in the filmic space in order to reveal the thought of eternal return.

A Dialogue with Claude Cahun: Between Writing, Photography and Film in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror

In this chapter, the artist filmmaker Sarah Pucill elucidates her artistic dialogue with the Surrealist lesbian artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), whose photographs and manuscripts are constitutive of her films Magic Mirror (2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (2016). Pursuing Pucill’s earlier interest in the intersubjectivity between women, the films re-enact Cahun’s photographs in the form of tableaux vivants, creating new connections between the French artist’s visual and written work and Pucill’s own creative practice. Drawing on Ágnes Pethő’s theoretical writing on the intermediality of the tableau vivant in film, the artist analyses how her re-enactment of Cahun’s photographs as tableaux vivants creates a sense of indecipherability caused by the overlaying of the original ‘ghost’ photograph with its re-staging in colour and with sound. The reworkings of Cahun's texts and photographs in the films conjoin different art forms and authors, interrogating questions of queer female subjectivity across time and space.

Train de vie. Il miraggio proibito dell’Occidente nel teatro di Matei Vișniec

"The subversive spirit of Matei Vișniec moves around the land of the forbidden and the censored. In Occidental Express (2009) the revolutionary idea takes the shape of a train of hope, heading to Paris, a heavenly mirage for migrants blinded by the lights on the horizon. Starting from the analysis of this sequence of tableaux vivants, this paper aims to reflect on the relationships that binds Utopia to postdramatic writing methods. Utopia is to be understood as a possibility for the intellectual to defeat the power relationships linking the consumerist West and the austerity of the communist regime, but also as a check suffered by the intellectual himself when he tries to overstep the laws of the system."